Adrift in a sea of sameness
9th July, 2025
There’s somebody who looks just like you, working for each of your competitors.
They’re doing the same keyword research. Spotting the same low-hanging fruit. Following the same influencers. Reading the same blogs. Building the same slides. Ticking the same SEO checklists. Fighting for the same technical fixes. Arguing with the same developers. Making the same business case, in the same way, to the same stakeholders.
Your product is just like theirs. Same problem, same solution. Same positioning, same pricing, same promise. Swap the logos on your homepages, and nobody would notice.
Your website is like a clone of your competitors. Same structure. Same language. Same design patterns. Same stock photos. Same author bios. Same thin “values”. Same thinking. Same mistakes.
And when someone in your team finally suggests doing something different – something bold, something opinionated, something genuinely useful or original – someone in your leadership will inevitably say, “but competitor X doesn’t do that”. And so the spiral begins.
We don’t do it because they don’t do it. They don’t do it because we don’t do it. Everybody looks to everybody else for permission to be interesting. Nobody acts. Nobody leads. Nobody dares. Just a whole ecosystem of well-meaning people in nice offices running perfectly average businesses, trying not to get fired.
We call it market alignment. Brand protection. Consistency. But really, it’s just fear. Fear of being first. Fear of attention. Fear of being wrong. So we compromise. We polish. We go back to safe. Safe headlines. Safe CTAs. Safe content.
And now the kicker. This whole mess is exactly what AI is trained on.
When the web is beige, the machine learns to serve beige. Every echoed article trains the model to repeat the average. When sameness becomes a survival strategy, we don’t just lose market differentiation. We become fuel for our own redundancy.
If your content looks just like everything else, there’s no reason for a human to choose it, or for a machine to prioritise it. It might as well have been written by an AI, summarised by an AI, and quietly discarded by an AI.
This is your competition now. Not just the business next door with the same three pricing tiers and the same integration with HubSpot, but the agent reading both your sites and deciding which one their user never needs to visit again.
So, where are you unique? Or what could you do uniquely? Because everything else – your content, your tech stack, your keywords, your KPIs, your pages – that’s just table stakes.
And if you’re serious about showing up in search, that means asking harder questions. Not just “what keywords do we want to rank for?” but “what do we believe that nobody else does?”, “what are we brave enough to say?”, and “where can we be the answer, not just an option?”.
That’s not about chasing volume or clustering content by topic. It’s about clarity. Depth. Quality. It’s about knowing your market better than anyone else. Saying what others won’t. Building what others don’t. And tracking your impact like it matters.
The tools are here. The data is here. But what you do with them – that’s where you stop being average.
